Clarissa et al.

We said prayers for James and his family at Thoresway yesterday. The connection was fairly tenuous in that Becky was one of the singers in the sponsored hymn sing we did there about eighteen months ago, so it was good of Carolyn (churchwarden) to think of it. I cried for the first time then. I am not a crier by nature - for me tears tend to come with anger rather than with grief - and in any case I think shock had thus far kept tears at bay, but suddenly they welled up and kept seeping away all the way through from the intercessions to the dismissal.

I mentioned in an earlier blog the silly, dangerous things we all do as teenagers. Mark, James' uncle, was telling me that as a teenager he used to climb up the buildings in Victoria Street (Grimsby's main shopping street) and jump from roof top to roof top. Another friend (female, but at prep school with Mark - what did they teach them there?!?!?) mentioned snorkling in a riptide.

I see from the "This is South Devon" website that Becky's cousin Chris Hargreaves (Captain of Torquay United) has dedicated his goal on Tuesday to James.

EQUALISER DEDICATED TO JAMES
Herald Express Thursday, April 23, 2009

CAPTAIN Chris Hargreaves has dedicated his 49th minute equaliser at Barrow on Tuesday night to his young cousin James Carroll.
James, 17, was killed in an accident near his home in Preston last Sunday.
His family has been understandably shattered by his sudden loss, and Chris said: "James loved to come and watch me play.
"Over the years, he's travelled all over the country, to the different clubs I've played for.
"He was a terrific lad, and I always treasured the days when he was in the stand supporting me.
"Everyone in our family is still trying to come to terms with what's happened.
"So my first thought, when I scored this week of all weeks, was that it was a goal for James."

Silly, but a nice gesture. And it does show you the ripple effect of such a tragedy: a boy dies in Lancashire and people the length and breadth of England, including many strangers, have it brought to their attention and join (albeit momentarily) in the family's grief.

Becky has said that for the funeral they want people to wear black highlighted with pink. I still have the black dress and jacket with a pattern of huge pink cabbage roses I wore to James' christening - terribly old fashioned now, but still in excellent condition as it was never an outfit to slip down into everyday wear. I loved that beautiful bold fabric and had three very similar dressses in succession of which this was the last. Or I may just wear my plain black dress with my pink jacket instead of the customary black one.

Update

The funeral was so well attended that it was beyond the 'standing room only' stage with people outside in the rain. I have never seen a dress code adhered to so universally with not a single elderly aunt in her navy blue costume or former teacher in his sports jacket - the only people not in black highlighted with pink were those in scout uniform and a few small children in pink highlighted with black. The music from Becky's choir and James' youth band was excellent and excellently well chosen, and the eulogy was given by a lay-reader who clearly knew James and all the family; in fact if there has to be a funeral this was how a funeral should be. I don't know how Becky and Paul found the resolution to organise everything so well, right down to cooked food for everyone afterwards.

Last year my father agreed to open the resurfaced and refenced playground at the village hall in the village where we live. As the county councillor for the area he had played a small part in supporting the application for the grant which paid for the work. For various reasons the opening had to be postponed until May 16th.

This morning he received a phonecall from an officer for the standards committee at the county council telling him that he must not undertake this duty as there is an election on June 4th and it could thus be seen as electioneering.

He agreed to do it more than a year ago.
He was on the Swallow and Cuxwold Village Hall and Playing Fields Committee for nearly twenty years.
He did a stint as chairman of that committee.
He lives in the village, and everyone knows him.
The voting population of the two villages numbers 187 minus one who has died since the list was compiled, two who have moved away and three who don't celebrate their eighteenth birthdays until after June 4th.
He would have handed over a giant cheque and told the village what a great job the committee members, especially Kath the world champion grant-getter, have done. Nothing about himself.

Just how is that electioneering?

And to add insult to injury they want to substitute an officer who doesn't know the village at all, but who is an expert in the grants process and will probably make a political - if not party political - speech. Moreover the officer who phoned didn't even ask whether Pa was actually standing for the council this time. The lists haven't been published as the nominations aren't in yet. As it happens he is standing, but she didn't know because she didn't ask!

Isn't she beautifully concealed. This hen pheasant has been sitting like this on her nest for a while now under the hedge, right next to our drive gate and within feet of where the boys park their landrovers and disgorge themselves and their dogs whenever they visit us. She has laid so many eggs - far more than she can ever hope to hatch - that some have rolled away from the nest.

This is a poem written by my uncle in praise of my mother during my grandmother’s last illness and death. It seems to me that this is what Becky, Hannah, Issy, Maureen and Olive are doing now. Maybe it is what all women have to do?

Perpetual Problems

There’s a tolerable tea in the pot
And a passable pie on the table
And I’ll hold up the earth’s foundations
As soon as I am able.

There’s rather a mess in the bathroom:
I feel I’m a terrible wife –
If you look in the back of the cupboard
You’ll find some Elixir of Life.

The planets in their courses
Are maintained without much fuss,
And Early comes each morning
Like a reliable bus.

I wish I could make a nice porridge
Without a single lump;
You need a really good breakfast
On the day of the very Last Trump.

We float our good resolutions
To wreck on time’s ancient rocks,
And in the cracks of eternity
We wash the children’s socks.

Rain makes a dirty window,
Spots on a silver spoon;
But a cup of tea may give you grace
Some disastrous afternoon.

If we see to the mundane mending,
The soap, the shoes, and the salt,
The intricate wheels of the Universe
May never grind to a halt.

So hold up the fabric of being;
Put hems on its ragged end;
When it comes to the final accounting
There may not be too much to mend.

Peter Huston
1920 - 2008

There are two poems which keep going round and round in my head. Friends who have read the last two private blogs will know why.

Mid-term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Seamus Heaney

The Identification

So you think its Stephen?
Then I'd best make sure
Be on the safe side as it were.
Ah, there’s been a mistake. The hair
you see, its black, now Stephens fair ...
What’s that? The explosion?
Of course, burnt black. Silly of me.
I should have known. Then let’s get on.

The face, is that the face mask?
that mask of charred wood
blistered scarred could
that have been a child's face?
The sweater, where intact, looks
in fact all too familiar.
But one must be sure.

The scout-belt. Yes that’s his.
I recognise the studs he hammered in
not a week ago. At the age
when boys get clothes-conscious
now you know. Its almost
certainly Stephen. But one must
be sure. Remove all trace of doubt.
Pull out every splinter of hope.

Pockets. Empty the pockets.
Handkerchief? Could be any schoolboy's.
Dirty enough. Cigarettes?
Oh this can't be Stephen.
I don’t allow him to smoke you see.
He wouldn't disobey me. Not his father.
But that's his penknife. That’s his alright.
And that’s his key on the key-ring
Gran gave him just the other night.
Then this must be him.

I think I know what happened
. . . about the cigarettes
No doubt he was minding them
for one of the older boys.
Yes that’s it.
That’s him.
That’s our Stephen.

Roger McGough

Remember Becky, Paul and Hannah, for whom this is the reality, and James, who was only seventeen, in your prayers.

Lots of nasty things happen in life, but I think most of us would agree that the very worst is the death of a much loved child. I haven't got any children of my own, but my life is filled with much loved children among whom are my four godchildren.

Yesterday James was killed in a tragic accident. He was seventeen.

He went out for a walk as he often did, i-pod clamped to his ears and, as far as can be judged, took a short-cut across the railway line. A stupid avoidable accident.

Last time I saw James was Easter weekend - just a week ago. At dinner on Saturday I was hugely honoured by being the first person who had got a sensible answer about what he wanted for his eighteenth birthday in July: I had even set myself a date for going to Horncastle to browse the numerous antique shops there for the desired pewter tankard.

On Monday morning he and his family went for coffee at Joe's to see his house: I laughed at him and called him a horrible child when he expressed a liking for Joe's stuffed fox in a glass case and said that he wanted one of his own. His mother and I were quite vehement about our dislike of using dead animals as decorative items. I would go and shoot a dozen foxes for him myself if by doing so I could make the last two days disappear. My last words to/about him were as they were driving away.
"Are you driving the whole way?" I asked his dad, "Or do you take turns?"
The reply was that it would probably be turns.
"Two way? Or is it three now?" I asked, glancing at James.
"Heaven forbid," replied Becky, "much too dangerous!"
Maybe if he had learned to drive, he wouldn't have been out walking. You can't help thinking these stupid things.

I keep thinking back to the last really terrible time in Becky's life when, in the final act of a three year period which she later described as being like living in a badly written soap, her first husband suddenly left her just as she was at last carrying a baby after a series of miscarriages. She phoned me a lot during that time, and she told me that it was only that expected baby which made her think life was still worth living.

James was an engaging baby, a delightful child, and was growing up to be a lovely young man. From his paper round when he was thirteen to the prestigious apprenticeship he opted for at sixteen in preference to sixth-form and university, he was always a conscientious worker. But most of all he was a loving member of a loving family who will leave the most enormous hole in so many lives.

Here are just a few pictures of him on various days out with his parents, sister, cousins etc.

I suppose that everybody has 'always people' in their lives. For the most part they are not related, but they have always been there. Sometimes they are known as uncle or aunt though there is no claim in blood, sometimes they are firmly Mr., or Mrs. or Miss, and just occasionally they are known by their first names. Sometimes they have an official place in our lives as godparents, but mostly I suppose they are neighbours from childhood or our parents' friends. Some are very close and some are simply always there somewhere in the background of our lives.

Alda Harker, who died this week, was one of the ever diminishing group of 'always people' in my life. Her mother, Mrs. Hadfield, was a friendly acquaintance of my grandmother. Alda went to school with my mother although a couple of years senior to her. As Mrs Windley she taught at the primary school I went to, and my sister was in her class both in the top infants and the bottom juniors, although I never was and really only knew her through music lessons. She lived in a neighbouring road, and my sister and I played with her daughters - Ann, the oldest, succeeded me as house captain of York in our respective final years of primary school, while the middle daughter, Helen, was in the same class as my sister Helen (two of half-a-dozen Helens in their year) and they were off and on (in the way of little girls) best friends. Later she became almost a relative when she married my father's second cousin's widower, David Harker. We have exchanged Christmas cards forever.

What none of this tells you, of course, is what a thoroughly nice lady she was - a really kind teacher in the days when strict and thorough still tended to take precedent, and as kind to animals as she was to children.

Monday

Alan, a long ago schoolfriend, has just emailed "I have very fond memories of Mrs Windley. I can vividly remember her in the summers wearing her flowered dresses with full skirts with matching slingback shoes." while Liz wrote "I hadn't seen her in years, but always liked her very much."

HE IS RISEN
 
HE IS RISEN INDEED!
HALLELUJAH!

Yesterday evening I went to supper with Issy, which was very nice with two of my four best friends, their husbands, their mother, two of my godchildren, their respective little sisters and my nephew Joe.

After a fairly late supper, Isabel remembered that she really ought to run through the hymns she would be playing at church in the morning, so some of us gathered round the piano to lend support by singing them. Having sung all three, we then sang a lot more , and it was getting on for two o'clock before we sang one final Easter Hymn, wished each other a Happy Easter and Joe and I departed. I felt quite guilty that while Joe was going to a Sunrise / Son Rise service at Walesby (where he is pumping the organ) at 6.30 and the others were going to an even earlier Sunrise / Son Rise service at North Owersby at 6.00, I was going to be a lie-a-bed as I wasn't heading to Communion at Cuxwold until 10.30. However Becky now informs me that, after stacking the dishwasher, she and Issy settled down for another session at the piano, so my guilt is assuaged.

HAPPY EASTER

This week two men of my aquaintance have suffered set-backs in the work they love - one in his paid employment, the other in his main voluntary activity.

Not that long ago A found that his job had been organised out of existance, and he was redeployed doing a job he liked less well. Being a good, conscientious man he worked hard at that job and when his immediate superior left he applied for her job. He wasn't even interviewed and - to add insult to injury - the job was given to someone junior to him both in years and in current position in their workplace. He is devastated.

B has not been nominated to continue in a post he has held for the last year and to which he has given a great deal of himself in time, energy and money.

Yesterday listening to the Gospel I heard faint echoes for these two men (both devout Christians) in Our Lord's rejection by the very people who only days earlier had cheered him into Jerusalem.

A friend of both A and myself, who is spiritual rather than religious, says that the universe has a way of nudging people into a new direction and this is what is happening to A. I call the nudger God, and quote Jonah III vs.1-3 which may well be very appropiate in this particular case.

At the moment all I can see for B is that he is being pushed out of something that he loves and values by people less committed than himself.

I was in the shower this morning. I had no work to go to today so there was time to have a good sing - the acoustics are fantastic and my inadequate mezzo can be made to sound like the purest soprano or the richest contralto - to my ears anyway. I sing anything - hymns, folksongs, songs from the shows, Schubert, Mozart, Sullivan . . .

Today I found myself singing a song I had never heard before. I think it is entirely my own. So I have written it down and put it on my doggeral blog. Over there I have set it out with the notes, the voices and the repetitions, but here there is just the bare text. I hear it with a small group of girls'/children's voices.

In the new washed world
When the rain had gone
And the sun shone
And the raven flew away
But the dove returned
With a sprig of green
And a rainbow appeared in the sky
Yes, a rainbow appeared in the sky
Proclaiming God’s promise on high
Yes, proclaiming God’s promise on high
Yes, proclaiming God’s promise on high

Yes, I am very well aware that not merely is it not great poetry - it isn't even a poem: it's the lyric for a song.

Jacob will be twenty-one on May 1st. When asked what he wanted, he said that he wanted a dog of his own. They are not short of dogs in his house. His parents have a dog each, as do his younger brother and sister; but until now Jacob has taken his sister's spaniel or his mother's dalamatian to work while they have been respectively at school and at work. (Unlike farms neither schools nor hospitals look kindly on "bring your pet to work".)

This little lady was ready to leave her mother so Jacob got his present four weeks early and Teasel joined the family.

A couple of weeks back I wrote a short blog about 'inherited speech patterns' which was about turns of phrase which remain in speech for generations out of time and out of region.

Somebody, trying to promote his/her website, sent this comment:

Pronounciation (sic) in inherited speech patterns can be helped by clear speech exercises for speech impediments & defects ~speaking clearly matters -on how to speak clearly, pronounce corretly (sic), articulation: clear speaking

After nearly forty years of teaching speech and drama (my mother also taught speech and drama so I started with my first pupils under her guidance when I was just 16 and preparing for my own grade 8) I think I know about all of that. What amazes me is that there are many people including those who profess some sort of expertise in the subject who cannot differentiate between speech impediments, sloppy speech, regional accents and dialect.

The simple phrase 'Bun and butter' can be used to define these differences.

"B-b-b-b-bun and b-b-b-b-butter" is a speech impediment.*

"Bun and bu'er" is sloppy speech which should be corrected kindly but firmly by parents and teachers before it becomes a bad habit.

"Boon and booter" or "Ban and batter" are regional accents and should be left alone unless a person has specifically chosen to learn Received Pronunciation. Actors need to learn it as the most used accent in period drama and one which is generally useful, and it is still the most widely accepted way of speaking English for professional people.

"Bap, cob, stottie, barm cake, batch cake, flour cake or bread cake and butter" are dialect words which add to the wonderful colour and variety of spoken English and should not merely be accepted, but actively encouraged.

By the way, if a new word for bun or roll (or for butter, for that matter) is suddenly coined by the young, that too should be embraced as part of our amazingly varied language.

*Stammers and the like, as well as problems caused by dental or facial deformities, are work for speech therapists whose qualifications required entirely different and altogether more scientific studies than those of speech and drama teachers who should not meddle with what they only partially understand.

Isn't the weather odd! Today it is cold and misty: yesterday we sat coatless out in the garden for tea. Yes, proper afternoon tea in the country with cucumber sandwiches and a vicar.

Lisbet, who was our rector before she went back to Sweden, was over here on a visit, so I invited her to tea. I also invited lots of people from the group of parishes, of whom just two came. Admittedly it was a midweek afternoon and fairly short notice, but I would have thought a few more people would have come even if it was just to pop by and say hello. How quickly people who were fairly central to our lives are forgotten once they move away. Mind you, when she was here, Lisbet was living alone, and I believe that I was one of only two parishoners who regularly invited her back to Sunday lunch. Jean, the other one, took her out to a fish and chip lunch yesterday after a morning spent with her walking club.

Despite the small numbers it was a very pleasant social occasion, and there are some cream cakes left over for Josh who is crazy for them.

It is two-and-a-half years since Lisbet left and we are still in interregnum. It has to be said that Swallow has not done well by its rectors and many seem to have been driven to depression and/or drink over the centuries; those escaping to foreign parts (two of the last three) are the fortunate ones. It has now been suggested that our very hard working Rural Dean should be officially inducted as priest-in-charge in addition to his present group of parishes. He's a lovely man and, as I said, very hard-working, but there is a limit to what any human being can do! For his own sake I think he should probably refuse.

Yesterday was April Fools' Day. (Was it fear that it was some sort of wind-up that kept people away? I do have a bit of a reputation, but I didn't do any yesterday and never do any after noon or on any other day.) Today is my sister's birthday, except that she has decided not to have one this year. Tough! I bought her present just after Christmas, long before she made her announcement, and I have taken it round to her. If she doesn't unwrap it that's her problem.

Maybe it isn't just vicars Swallow drives to depression? Shame. It really is a nice little place.